Up-to-date the concern of the environment and the climate change is arguable one of our times biggest and a severe issue; hence finding new sustainable technological solutions to the replacement or reducing of fossil-based materials is a great challenge.1 The urge and the spark in this field have promoted the scientific community to face this problem. In this context, biofuels made from renewable resources is a good alternative from the environmental point of view, having less negative impact compared to fossil based fuels. The conversion of biomass to biofuel is an intensively studied and highly attractive goal, while demanding to accomplish.2 Alcohols such as methanol, ethanol, butanol and isopropanol are versatile organic compounds and desirable starting materials, which are easily accessible from biomass (e.g. through fermentation, pyrolysis, etc.) and can be further manipulated for the employment as biofuels.
Research in the conversion of alcohols to long-chain alkanes is starting to grow. Anbarasan et al. demonstrated the catalytic conversion of extractive fermentation to potential fuel chemicals by the integration of chemical catalysis.4 Moreover, the group of Groger presented a mild stepwise approach for the synthesis of Guerbet alcohols.5,6,7 It is known that aldehydes can be condensated/oligomerized using organic catalysts. However, the one-pot conversion of alcohols to oligomeric aldehydes is not known. There are examples in the use of heterogeneous catalysis for the hydrogenation or oxidation reactions of enals and allylic alcohols, respectively.8,9 However, integrating this type of catalysis to application of short chain alcohols, aldehydes and ketones is challenging due to the elevated temperatures, needed for these applications, which are often above the boiling point of these short chain compounds. Moreover, compatibility issues may occur for less bulky substrates. Thus, the conversion of simple alcohols to valuable functional alkanes (e.g. biofuels, Guerbet alcohols, synthons) under mild conditions using integrated catalysis is of great importance.